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Herzl’s Legacy

A letter in response to Leo Carey’s article (August 27, 2012)

Leo Carey’s piece on Stefan Zweig discusses the relationship between actual people and the writer’s fictional characters, and stresses Zweig’s modesty and also his failure to speak out on behalf of his fellow-Jews during the leadup to the Holocaust (A Critic at Large, August 27th). Carey mentions Theodor Herzl as an early supporter of Zweig. Both men were trapped in a culture that allowed Jews into the universities but restricted their opportunities and rejected them as a people. But the two highly gifted men used their literary skills quite differently. Without Herzl, there would be no Israel today, and his El-Arish project stands as one of the Jewish people’s finest moments. Zweig wrote a very moving description of Herzl’s funeral, depicting the large number of attendees “weeping, howling, screaming” at graveside, in “a kind of elemental and ecstatic mourning” that Zweig had never seen.